To cook pasta correctly, it must be boiled in properly seasoned salt water. When the pasta is placed in boiling water, it absorbs a certain amount of salt. In a cooking environment (e.g., in a commercial pasta cooker), the level of the water and the amount of salt in the water is constantly changing. The effect is even greater in pasta cookers with an autofill feature that are constantly adding fresh water to the cooking vessel and draining undissolved salt through the bottom, or skimming the top layer of water. As a result, the water does not stay properly seasoned throughout the cooking cycle.
To check the saltiness, commercial pasta cookers require a user to taste the water each time a new batch of pasta is added to the cooking vessel. Because the water is boiling, this process can be painful for the user. The process is also subjective, as it requires user input. Different user preferences can result in differences between batches of pasta. And a variety of factors—such as kitchen's varying air quality, symptoms of allergies or a cold, or what other foods the user has recently eaten—can affect a user's ability to judge the water's salinity. This process is also inefficient as it demands a great deal of unnecessary attention from the chef throughout service, especially when the chef should be focusing on other critical aspects of pasta cookery that require a much higher level of expertise, as opposed to an elementary function such as seasoning boiling water.
Devices currently exist to measure the conductivity of the water, which can be used as a proxy for salt levels. However, these devices cannot distinguish between dissolved salt (NaCl), and any other ions or molecules in the solution, which can change conductivity. Additionally, this measurement only gives an approximation of the relative concentration of salts in the water, and cannot provide the user with the correct amount of salt to add to the water, in order to return the system to the target level of salinity. Lastly, this measurement cannot predict how long this particular amount of salt would last in the volume of water.
Accordingly, there is a continued need in the art for a system to accurately estimate the salt content of a volume of water and to predict how long this amount of salt will last in the volume of water over a period of time.